"Be humble. Be teachable. The universe is bigger than your view of the universe. There's always room for a new idea. Humility is necessary for growth."
Pauli once told von Neumann the result of a difficult physical problem and how he had arrived at it. Von Neumann replied that the same result could be derived from just one axiom.
Pauli responded, 'Herr von Neumann! If physics could be done with axioms, you'd be a great physicist!'
(From Jagdish Mehra's obituary of Richard Feynman)
People love to say, “We need to encourage young people to try, fail, and learn.”
But in practice, they do the opposite.
When was the last time you saw someone genuinely celebrate failure?
Everyone is obsessed with prodigies. I side with the people who fail, and keep trying.
This sort of thing was not just limited to Kazanas. Starobinsky (1980) and Sato (1981) had related work in the same window, and Gliner had even earlier precursors in 1965.
Guth’s publication had the most full-fledged development of the theory, and the monopole + flatness analysis led to it becoming canonical.
Unfair, but sadly there are many papers out there to keep track of.
Totally new to me. I knew about Starobinsky's prior work, but it looks like Kazanas may have been the first to propose inflation as a solution to a problem with the hot big bang model.
Today in "I got shafted because I wasn't as famous as the other guy": Demos Kazanas, the first to propose inflation to solve the homogeneity problem.
Inflation is usually credited to Alan Guth, with important follow-up work by Andre Linde, and Paul Steinhardt & Andy Albrecht.
"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
-- John von Neumann (1903 - 1957)